Rolling in the Windy City since 2015

2017 Hobby Plans – Ben

With Adepticon done and gone, and a bit of a break taken from hobbying, I’m ready to get rolling again, and the best way to start that is by planning out the year. As we’ve mentioned before, our hobby yearly schedule tends to revolve around Adepticon, with other tournaments (Such as Operation Sting for Bolt Action in November) also making appearances with their own dedicated projects. Obviously as the year goes on, plans sometimes change, projects will get modified or replaced, new ideas will emerge. But it always helps to have an idea of what you want to accomplish, so here goes.

Bolt ActionUnited States Marines – Tarawa – Operation Sting
Some of you might remember that I was working on my US Marines for last year’s Operation Sting. I ended up taking them, but due to procrastination I didn’t finish them to anywhere near the standard I wanted them to be, not to mention never really starting work on the display board that I had planned. Normally I wouldn’t re-use an army for the same tournament, as I like to change things up (and who doesn’t like new toys!), but I want to give them some redemption. As Operation Sting decided to go with a thematic approach this year, including locking players into armies based around 1943, I tweaked my original Saipan approach to the USMC and changed it over to Tarawa, another hugely iconic battle of the Pacific. Many of the models that I put work in on last year will be re-used, but I’ll be building on the painting I did on them to actually finish the models. I’ll also need to build and paint some new stuff (notably a pair of LVT-2 transports, the older but smaller brother of the LVT-4 Buffalo I took last year). The display board plan remains mostly the same, with a beach landing depiction, however I have a more detailed plan in my head with specific details from the landings at Tarawa that will be prominent in the layout.

United States Army – M18 Hellcat Tank Hunter platoon – Ardennes Themed
I’ve wanted to do a winter force for a while, and when I received my Hellcats from Warlord and from Trenchworx that dream started to take more focus. In the long run I may end up adding enough infantry to run a standard reinforced Ardennes platoon as well, but for now the plan is a 1500 point armored platoon (a common size for Tank War tournaments/games) that revolves around a Hellcat tank hunter platoon of 2 Hellcats with their assigned M20 scout car. Supporting them would be some bazooka armed jeeps and infantry in halftracks, roaming the winter wonderland searching for German armor.

Adepticon Teams –No idea. Pending project.
Yeah, this is a future project. No idea where we are going with it yet, Andrew and I have both stated that we want to do it again next year, so it’s planned, but we haven’t been able to decide on a force yet. Some ideas have come up, and once we have one picked we’ll obviously post about it. Last year we didn’t come up with the Partiboys until November though, so it may be a bit!

Age of Sigmar -Stormcast Eternals –Potential Adepticon 2018 Championships
I picked up the new Stormcast book when it came out and have been occasionally reading through it and scheming about what I’ll be doing for the Championships next year. Age of Sigmar is a great game, and while I do have nostalgia every now and then for the classic ranks and flanks of Fantasy, AoS is solid. I have a good amount of Stormcast both assembled and still on sprue, with a few test models having some paint on them. Some of the new Vanguard units really caught my eye, so nothing is remotely finalized for lists or anything like that, but I’ll be working on these in the upcoming months as well. Currently trying to decide what sort of theme the force will have, as well as which Chamber.

Warhammer 40k – 8th Edition Black Templars
Obviously this is up in the wind as all we know right now are some of the new rules concepts. Warhammer-Community.com has been posting a lot of great articles and walkthroughs of the new system, and I will say that I am very excited for it. Fluff-wise we will have to see what they do with everything, but my current plan is to pull out my horribly neglected Black Templars and get some work in on them. This may become an Adepticon project of some kind as well depending on how 8th plays out and what the event schedule looks like next year.

Other GamesBlood and Plunder – English Buccaneers
Blood and Plunder is a (relatively) new one from Firelock games, a skirmish wargame that pits pirates and privateers against each other on land and at sea. Between our various friends I believe we have all of the current factions owned. I’ve posted a few pictures on Instagram of my Brigantine during its production process, once it’s done I’ll most likely write up an article that goes through the entire build and painting of it. All of my infantry figures have been primed up and I’m going to be starting to put paint on them this weekend. This project doesn’t have a deadline, but several of us want to get our stuff painted up and do some pirating. Nothing quite like a good ship battle.

Arena Rex- Legio XIII
This is one that was on my ‘projects I plan on getting to soon’ list in last year’s Hobby Goals article. Whoops. I have 4 models that are about half done on their paint jobs, and then another 2 characters that were released since I last worked on my stuff that I own but have not yet assembled. The models are gorgeous and you only need a few, so I do want to get to these, possibly right after I finish my Blood and Plunder force. The game is very fun, and again, it is only 6 models, and they are very good sculpts. We played a couple games about a month ago and it gave me the desire to get them finished up once I started hobbying again.

Not a huge list at the moment, but as I said, things may change. As always, when new projects get underway we’ll be posting updates on Instagram and in articles on here.